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ceed across platforms without creating
new conflicts among competing
publishers, broadcasters and digital
distributors. And it must be done at
a lower cost to those clients because
overall revenue for the news business
is compressing.
Consuming the News
There are no easy answers to any of
these questions, and a weak economy
compounds the difficulty. But at AP
we continue to focus on the fundamental
change in news consumption
patterns and what that means for both
content creation and distribution. In
the past year, with the help of a team
of professional anthropologists, we
studied the behavior of young-adult
news consumers in six cities around
the world and drew important conclusions
about how to reconstruct our
news model to fit the new cultural
reality of cross-platform, opportunistic
consumption of news.
Strip away the research jargon, and
what that means is that young people
around the world today are more likely
to connect to the latest news through
e-mail, search or text messaging than
through old media channels.
Of course, that was something we
very much expected to see. But through
the intense interview process that distinguishes
anthropology from simple
surveying, we also heard something
from the subjects we didn’t expect to
learn: They were mostly unsatisfied
with their news experiences.
Despite the convenience of alwayson
access, the subjects said they were
overdosing on short snippets of facts
and updates and longed to explore the
news in more breadth and depth. They
wanted more of the back and future
stories associated with the daily stream
of headline-driven news. And that was
the case across geography—cities in
the United States, Britain and India—
and across news category. No matter
if the topic was war, natural disaster
or entertainment, the consumers in
our study wanted to know more, and
they seemed willing to go get it, if only
they knew where to find it.
Whether or not the journalism
market is actually shorting breadth
and depth in favor of breaking news is
a question that could spark a spirited
debate in any newsroom around the
world, but the essential point should
not be missed. That is, whether or not
we’re producing it, people aren’t readily
finding it in the opportunistic patterns
of consumption they’ve adopted.
In today’s news environment, technology
unwraps the tidy packages that
news providers produce. News gets
split apart into atomic pieces for today’s
digital consumption—headlines,
25-word summaries, stand-alone
photos, podcasts and video clips—
all of which can be easily e-mailed,
searched and shared outside of their
original packaging.
Refitting the News
The model that emerged from our
anthropology study helped to frame
the task ahead by splitting the news
into its fundamental “atomic” pieces of
Facts, Updates, Back Story, and Future
Story. That sets up a mission to create
and connect the essential parts of a
next-generation news report, much as
the old “inverted pyramid” established
a framework for newspaper writing.
The inverted pyramid conditioned
writers to organize the information in
their stories from most important to
least important. It drove the journalism
and the business of the AP news
cooperative for more than a century
and a half, as the news was packaged
day in and day out for space-efficient
display in newspapers.
The model even worked for new
media as they came along through the
decades. AP created services based on
newspaper stories to supply news for
radio, television and eventually the
Internet and mobile platforms. But
newspaper stories, packaged as a snapshot
in time, struggle to connect with
an audience that is being conditioned
to aggregate and manipulate unpackaged
information on their own.
For AP, these trends delivered a
clear directive to adjust the newspaperstory-first
mentality. A shift to fastestformats-first
had already been made at
the agency well before our consumer
Rethinking
study. That shift has now accelerated
with key new initiatives to enhance
the differentiation of services to match
platform and market needs.
Chief among those initiatives is a
fundamental new process for newsgathering
in the field called “1-2-3
filing.” The name describes a new editorial
workflow that requires the first
words of a text story to be delivered in
a structured alert (headline format) to
be followed by a short, present-tense
story delivering the vital details in
step two. Then, in a final step, a story
takes whatever form is appropriate for
different platforms and audiences—a
longer form story or analysis for print,
for example. Other media types are
coordinated along the way in similar
fashion.
Another major initiative at AP responds
to the need for more variety in
the news. Major new content development
projects have been launched in
entertainment, sports and financial
news to create more entry points for
consumers with appetites for broader,
deeper content in those categories.
Across the gamut of AP’s reporting,
we are pursuing stories with impact
and writing in a lively and authoritative
style that has both raised our
profile and caused some traditionalists
to wonder where the old wire service
went. Despite the stir in some journalism
circles, there’s no reason to
mourn the loss of stodginess, real or
perceived. AP’s origins may trace back
to transcribing the shipping news, but
its future lies in engaging the audience
with more than just the facts, as our
new model suggests.
Content initiatives alone, however,
can’t get the job done. Digitally based
consumption by a fragmented audience
requires new and sophisticated
distribution mechanics, meaning an
infrastructure that can smartly connect
consumers to available, relevant
content in virtually unlimited ways. The
key to making that happen is to make
content more linkable and discoverable.
For that, you need a system for
tagging news content with codes for
categories and names (famous people,
places and things) that computers
can easily read to deliver content at
Nieman Reports | Winter 2008 69